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In the 1970s, this gifted performer emerged as a intelligent, humorous, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a familiar celebrity on both sides of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed the character Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive housemaid with a questionable history. Her character had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, extending into spinoff shows like Thomas & Sarah and No Honestly.

The Highlight of Brilliance: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of her career occurred on the big screen as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, cheeky yet charming journey set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, optimistic film with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that did not conform by conventional views about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the growing conversation about perimenopause and ladies who decline to fading into the background.

From Stage to Screen

It started from Collins performing the lead role of a an era in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an fantasy comedy about adulthood.

Collins became the star of London’s West End and Broadway and was then successfully cast in the smash-hit film version. This closely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a practical Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with uninteresting, predictable folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a free holiday in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the unexciting British holidaymaker she’s gone with – stays on once it’s over to experience the real thing away from the tourist compound, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the mischievous resident, Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Sassy, confiding Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to inform us what she’s thinking. It got huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Subsequent Roles

Post-Shirley, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including roles on Doctor Who, but she was less well served by the movies where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the caliber of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She was in Roland Joffé’s passable Calcutta-set drama, the movie City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's film about gender, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master setting in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself repeatedly cast in patronizing and syrupy older-age stories about old people, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as ropey located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Fun

Woody Allen provided her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the movie's title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a extraordinary moment in the sun.